Any leader or presenter will tell you that getting any audience to listen and stay engaged is a struggle. When you add overly long meetings, hybrid teams, and the ever present temptation of electronic distractions, holding the attention of an audience begins to look impossible.
However, with so much going on in today’s world and near constant updates and changes, it’s more important than ever for your message to be heard and understood.
Thankfully, there are some fantastic tools available to keep your audience engaged during meetings and presentations. Today we’ll take a look at:
These audience interaction tools will bring your team together, have them actively listening, and keep engagement going long past your last meeting.
The good news for those leading meetings is the same things keeping in-person engagement high can work with remote and hybrid audiences, too. By being deliberate in your planning and promoting more interaction, your audience will want to engage with you and your material.
Make sure you have an actual agenda for your meeting. Don’t make people leave their work and come to a meeting or presentation if it isn’t relevant to them.
Use some of the fantastic tools and activities we’ve put together to get your audience involved in your meeting or presentation. Engaging in active listening on your end can boost participation and excite an audience.
Keeping things light and humorous will put an audience at ease and give them more confidence to interact.
By combining these tips with a few activities and tools, audience interaction can greatly improve.
To see where your audience stands on something or to get the group brainstorming, have participants create a live word cloud. Audience members can join using a link, QR code, or room code and then start sending in a response in real-time. Participants can watch as words or phrases appear and grow depending on popularity.
Live Word Clouds are also fantastic for remote, hybrid, or in-person audiences. As long as you have a computer or screen, you can keep everyone involved.
Favorite Software for Word Clouds – SlidesWith; Sli.do
Everyone enjoys a little friendly competition and having a few trivia questions during a presentation can keep the audience engaged. Trivia quizzes can be customized to ask about any information just presented. Or, to give the audience a break, the trivia can be completely off-topic. Just have participants join on their phones and type in their answers.
Several tools allow the audience to see who answered the questions correctly, giving participants bragging rights.
Favorite Software for Trivia - Kahoot; SlidesWith
Another fantastic way to get feedback from an audience in real-time, polls give the opportunity for people to voice their opinions while seeing what their friends and co-workers think, too. Live polls also give leaders a great way to immediately check the pulse of their audience.
Allowing an audience to answer the poll on phones and then showing responses, either on a presentation screen or shared computer screen, gives everyone a chance to interact and engage.
Favorite Software for Live Polls – SlidesWith; Sli.do; Mentimeter
Many presenters shy away from live Q&As due to the discomfort that comes with needing to answer a question on the fly. However, nothing is more helpful than answering questions as audience members think of them. It’s a perfect way to encourage engagement and respond to that engagement in real-time.
What makes online Q&As so appealing is the presenter only has to answer the top voted questions. With the tools listed below, audience members will submit questions, but also vote on the questions they want answered. The voting system shows presenters what questions appeal to the most people and narrows down how many questions need to be answered.
Favorite Software for Audience Q&As – Sli.do; Vevox;
One hilarious way to get an audience to interact is to have them respond with sound! A live soundboard is an unexpected and extremely lively way to encourage audience interaction.
The presenter can pose a question to the group and then have the audience answer the question by recording their answer with their phones. Perfect for keeping hybrid groups and engaged and feeling connected, these answers can be a hilarious way to draw audiences back into the conversation.
At the moment, Slides With Friends is the only software that offers the ability for audiences to respond live through a soundboard.
Favorite (Only) Interactive Software for Live Audience Soundboards - SlidesWith
